The Top 10 Features Shared by All the Best Lending Software Solutions
You can’t figure out what’s the best lending software solution for your financial institution unless you check each option to see how it handles the most essential loan management tasks.
The ten most important features to review include:
- Portfolio Monitoring
- Statement Spreading
- Online Loan Applications
- Loan Pricing
- Client Relationship Management
- Commercial Lending
- Small Business Lending
- Consumer Lending
- Exception Tracking
- Credit Memo Automation
We asked banking experts from Baker Hill to reveal the most important things for bankers to consider when evaluating potential new lending software solutions. Keep reading for their insider advice on how to choose a technology that provides all the insights and resources you need to drive growth and profitability.
Lending software solution advice from expert Kevin Dooley
Today’s lending environment has become so quick and efficient with lending software solutions that sometimes it is challenging to keep up with the pace.
You can build credit and underwriting benchmarks into those lending software solutions, so the good people in credit barely need to analyze a request before it's closed and on the books.
With lending seeming to go at warp speed, how do we get in front of the credits that may have slipped through? The ones that maybe were a little on the border or even the ones that start to go the wrong way on the risk rating scale means that monitoring an institution’s portfolio becomes even more critical.
The only way to keep up is with good portfolio monitoring and a system that works with your lending software solution. It can be the key player helping your staff get ahead of problems, maybe before they even become problems.
We are all familiar with various underwriting standards that are evaluated to approve credit. Of course, we need to analyze cash flow coverage ratios and debt burdens associated with a credit request. We also incorporate these into our loan agreements to define future performance, covenants we are all familiar with.
While these tried-and-true ways of monitoring performance have been beneficial for years, each is monitoring the past. A lending software solution for today’s lending environment should help direct Institutions to credit relationships becoming the most vulnerable and threatening and may need immediate attention.
To get ahead of problem loans, a lending software solution needs to look at behaviors. The current state of lending has afforded Institutions better access to information.
We no longer need to wait for companies and individuals to submit financial information to test against covenants that were agreed upon when loans originated. Credit agency reporting has become more consistent, and scores of individuals and companies are more current than ever before.
Following and documenting those reported fluctuations in a customer’s behavior can indicate loan performance in the future. How borrowers are handling their deposit relationships can be an indication.
If balances have significantly decreased, that may be a sign cash flow is getting constrained. Possibly the institution has started to see customers overdraft those deposit accounts.
What if revolving lines of credit have stopped revolving and balances remain high? Don’t forget about delinquencies and clients stretching out their payment cycle, but we’re trying to stay ahead of that. All can be indications that something is happening that the institution has not been made aware of.
You can check all these indicators every day within your lending software solution. You can design rules to run in the background and “listen in” on activities to determine if an account needs a little more attention. You can assign all those triggers to specific staff to contact clients to determine what is affecting the business.
Portfolio monitoring is about getting ahead of issues and planning to minimize the risk to the portfolio and institution overall. It empowers portfolio managers by showing them what may be lurking and the reason to track down what has become the riskiest part of their portfolios in their lending software solution daily.
Managing risk is the most crucial factor in lending. Assessment and monitoring risk is a constant process. With consistent information, it can prove beneficial to any institution.
A portfolio monitoring system that works with your lending software solution will help your institution proactively manage risk and help identify what risk is growing in your portfolio.
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Lending software solution advice from expert Jonathan Rhodes
Every lending software solution has plenty of features—even when it comes to the basic functionality of statement spreading. Each vendor thinks they know the best way to spread, and they surely hope that you will agree.
I am a picky user of all software, and I can undoubtedly suggest different ways to perform that I feel would make my life easier.
The best feature that a user like me can ask for is the ability to customize my experience. You want a lending software solution that is “highly configurable.”
When it comes to statement spreading, our lending software solution provides an excellent baseline experience, offering industry-specific templates and reports to get you up and running immediately.
For power users, this is where the best lending software solutions will shine. If you wish, create new statement templates defining each chart of account line, its line title, the order it’s in, etc.
Build new reports for your template from scratch or copy one of the standard reports and make subtle adjustments. You can add covenants by selecting from a list of the most used ratios or add any new covenant formula you can think of.
While you’re spreading, add cell comments and endnotes that appear in your reports, perform calculations within a cell instead of reaching for the calculator, update statuses on covenants and enter all sorts of details in each period header.
Use period statuses to track changes, enter currency conversion rates for every year you need them, rearrange the period order, or hide periods from view while you’re working. I could go on and on, and I haven’t even mentioned projections.
Yes, you can also take an existing statement and easily create a projection from it. Forecast up to 12 periods out with different assumption factors for sales, COGS, inventory, capital expenditures, and debt.
Cash flow and debt values flow from the statement into the debt analysis operation of loan origination, so the information is at your fingertips when you need it and all within the lending software solution. If credit bureaus are pulled and return tradeline information, you’ll see that in the debt schedule of the statement.
The best lending software solutions put the relevant information where you need it inside your lending software solution when you need it. If I haven’t convinced you yet, you can use the statements of one entity or several entities and create a global cash flow report with other members of a group.
Groups are a super helpful feature of statement spreading products in lending software solutions, and the best technologies—like Baker Hill NextGen—can automatically create groups for you. However, a global cash flow report isn’t the only reason to use the groups in a lending software solution; you can also compare entities in a specific industry using a peer comparison report.
If you need to aggregate financials across several entities in a group, you can create a consolidated statement and see everything in one place. You also can upload tax returns and let the system spread them exactly as you wish because you can edit how every box on the tax form is mapped to the statement template.
Additionally, if your customer is using bookkeeping software, you can request that they electronically send their financial statement to your lending software solution, where it is spread automatically. It’s kind of magical
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Lending software solution advice from expert Matt Sifferlen
The best lending software solutions can help you quickly deploy simple to use loan applications.
If your organization is actively evaluating lending software solutions, you should think about these considerations to best position yourself for a successful online loan applications rollout.
Know Your Customers (and Your Staff)
I’m not talking about identity verification or knowing your customer-related efforts. Instead, I’m talking about understanding the digital maturity and savviness of the end-users for your digital lending software solutions.
Your loan applications will be used by a broad spectrum of individuals, all with various levels of tech or banking savviness. And when it comes to your staff, as one of our clients commented, “the tech-savvy don’t know banking, and the banking savvy don’t know tech!”
Now while that may sound like stereotyping, it does indicate that you need to make sure that any digital application you roll out with your lending software solution is easy to use and won’t provide an intimidating experience where users struggle and eventually give up.
For example, the assistant branch manager that processes consumer loan applications 95% of the time might get tripped up when a small business owner or middle-market borrower starts asking detailed questions about collateral and funding questions specific to business loan requests.
All the training in the world won’t make that assistant manager fluent in business lending if that’s not what they’re spending their time on each day. And, applicants don’t like to hear the dreaded “I’ll have to get back with you on that” since they might fear that means delays of days and likely weeks before they’ll be contacted with follow-up.
You can defuse some of this potential intimidation by crafting your loan applications with leading questions that make your staff ask intentional questions that will help steer the loan request toward the appropriate products.
Put as much coaching and educational tips into the staff-facing application in your lending software solution, so staff can be reminded to ask the right questions and pair the requests with the right products.
Growth Without Efficiency Doesn’t Scale
So many bankers I talked to say they expect their aggressive loan growth goals to be largely facilitated by their retail branch staff. This can come with some challenges when it comes to the depth of banking knowledge that these often-early career folks might have.
They might not even have a mortgage or a car loan of their own yet, and yet the pressure is on them to rapidly become experts on these products. This isn’t going to happen, so these individuals need lending software solutions that will help them succeed since you can’t expect them to confidently handle a growing volume of applications while still juggling their other responsibilities.
Whether it’s a public-facing loan application or one used by your staff, you must minimize the downstream rework and delays that will occur if the loan request gets paired with the incorrect product. Inexperienced staff or borrowers might not know what product best fits their need, so they might just quickly push the application through based on their best guess and hope for the best.
The problem is that once the credit underwriting or compliance team gets involved and points out why the selected product isn’t appropriate, this can kick off a series of delays, creating a frustrating customer experience. New disclosures are getting shared, new questions might get asked, emails are flying, and this all takes time to mop up. If this process takes too long, applicants will just give up and go to a competitor.
Efficiency also needs to be a concern after the application gets submitted in the lending software solution. The more complex the loan request and the more dollars involved, it’s likely there will be more follow-up questions regarding financial documentation like income verification, tax returns, financial statements, etc.
Suppose you can keep this vital part of the loan process within the same lending software solution as the application process. In that case, you’re creating a consistent and easy-to-follow process for your customers and staff in a channel that they’re already using.
Look for a lending software solution with a client portal that serves this very need. It should act as a centralized hub for all document requests and collection efforts, working seamlessly with our application products so customers don’t have to context switch between various digital channels.
Avoid Games of Digital Tag
The third key consideration for a lending software solution should be around the effectiveness of your communication processes supporting digital application efforts. Responsiveness can be a real superpower for lenders, and many traditional lenders know that FinTechs are aggressively trying to steal their customers with sleek and simple low-friction loan applications and friendly, cleverly named chatbots just waiting to help online loan applicants.
The amount of time applicants are willing to wait in the digital line is shrinking with each generation. If your organization can’t provide quick responses to customer requests, then loans will start bottlenecking. This will not result in happy customers.
Any perception that your organization doesn’t have its act together and those communications are going into a black hole will be fatal to your efforts. Make sure that outstanding responsiveness is a pillar of your digital application and lending software solution ecosystem.
Lenders that can quickly acknowledge customer questions and provide effective responses that keep the application process humming will be at a distinct advantage over those still struggling with who owns online communications surrounding a loan request.
To simplify and streamline your responsiveness efforts, take advantage of a client portal that pushes all communications into a single online destination and that supports pushing notifications via email or within your lending software solution if possible.
Ask applicants to pick a preference for how they want to be contacted since maybe they have email fatigue and just want to check the status of their application online when they feel like it.
And take a hard look at incenting staff not based solely on the number of successful loan submissions they make but also on their ability to be responsive throughout the full application lifecycle using a lending software solution.
After all, shots on goal are important but getting the ball successfully past the goalie requires finesse and a commitment to the focused and timely effort.
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Lending software solution advice from expert John Robertson
Why should you be concerned about deposit values? Deposits are gold!
When using a lending software solution’s funds transfer pricing system, there are certain assumptions made by the deposit category of their expected life or duration. The value assigned generally is the term equivalent of some index, such as the FHLB advance rates.
The flattened yield curve has created a perplexing scenario for credit being applied to deposits. Operating expenses for deposits on average differ significantly due to the activity and processes put into place to manage the transactions. Demand deposit accounts have the highest volume of activity. Therefore, additional operating expenses are applied to this type of product in a lending software solution.
As an offset, significantly more non-interest income is generated in this product category than other deposit products. Interest-bearing demand deposits have a higher cost structure but are not as significant as demand deposit accounts since this product of a lending software solution acts as a haven for immediately accessible funds daily.
The non-interest income for this category is much less. Money market deposit accounts are restricted by several transactions in a period. Thus, the transaction costs are lower, with little non-interest income generated.
Finally, savings accounts have a higher non-interest expense than money market deposit accounts or Interest-bearing demand deposit accounts because depositors tend to go in and out of that account more frequently, thus more transactional costs.
Finally, certificates of deposit are pretty much one and done from a cost perspective since the money sits there for the stated term.
The dilemma arises when the funding curb is relatively flat, and the term value equivalent does not offset the expense being applied to the deposit categories as outlined above. The deposit operating expenses can only be squeezed so much.
Lending software solution technologies can only do so much in reducing the costs of managing deposits. Extending the expected life for each category could be a way to represent value, but how far out on the curve do you go—10 years? 15 years?
Deposits have worth, but the math applied using a flat curve for some balance tiers/sizes result in negative values.
Until the funding curve normalizes, a tiered deposit neutral approach could be employed to avoid calculated negative deposit values. When building a cost distribution system product balance breakpoints are established for expense allocation. Each tier has a percentage of non-interest expenses being applied in pricing.
By applying the costs on a percentage basis for each deposit category and the related balances, a neutral effect, giving a zero value to the differing size of deposit balances can be achieved. Of course, for larger deposit balances, the operating expenses and FTP value applied would result in a positive value. The objective would be not to eliminate larger depositor contributions but to lessen the negative values for smaller deposits.
The result of this approach is to address the unusual economic circumstances that currently exist. As the funding curve begins to normalize, you can make adjustments in cost allocations to reflect a truer market condition and eliminate deposits not being perceived as “gold.”
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Lending software solution advice from expert Kathy Daugherty
A good client relationship management product focuses on the sales management stage of loan origination and includes insightful reporting right inside the lending software solution.
Look for a technology that is designed to assist in attracting and retaining clients. It should combine your business process and client information across all departments in your financial institution.
You want a lending software solution with client relationship management that is completely configurable in multiple ways. You want something that lets you report out the data and gives you the flexibility and information you need to best understand your pipeline and drive growth for your financial institution.
Look for a lending software solution with a client relationship management product that makes it an impressive and easy-to-use tool for any financial institution. Having an automated client relationship management system embedded in your lending software solution, in general, is remarkable.
Implementing a client relationship management solution is a great way to keep things centralized, organized, and available for tracking and review quickly and easily. It’s also important to mention reports (both ad hoc and scheduled) can give you an insight into your financial institution’s sales pipeline.
You probably also want to make sure the lending software solution has the ability to integrate with Microsoft Outlook so that activity records (appointments, phone calls, and tasks) may be viewed, added, edited, or deleted in the technology or Microsoft Outlook. The integration kind of integration can help ensure double booking of appointments is cut down to a minimum.
The best lending software solutions use queries as another way to report out your data. Each user, if given permissions, is able to create their own query allowing them to see the data in a format that they need right inside the lending software solution they’re using every day.
If you don’t know how to or just don’t want to make your own query, there is also the option to contact our expert system administrators, as they will have the knowledge to create a query for you and share it with others. The best thing about queries is once run, you are in the recordable to make updates and edits as needed with the click of a button.
The best lending software solutions with client relationship management also include referrals which are an important part of the sales management and pipeline reporting process. Referrals may originate either internally or externally in your lending software solution.
Once a referral has been added to the system, it can be rejected, thus ending the potential opportunity or progressing into an opportunity within the lending module. You can also monitor referrals via reports and queries within the lending software solution.
Having an integrated client relationship management in your lending software solution is a powerful tool that will help you better understand your prospects, clients, and opportunities which is invaluable as you grow your business.
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Lending software solution advice from the team of experts at Baker Hill
Selecting a lending software solution is one of the most important decisions your financial institution will make, especially when it comes to a commercial loan origination system. The right tool allows a financial institution to address all its commercial lending needs in a single integrated platform, from prospecting all the way to credit analysis and the structure of the loan.
Core Systems Integration
A good commercial lending software solution should easily import data from the institution’s core systems or from other external systems. When data is always current and continuously analyzed in accordance with each institution’s policy, the centralized performance database becomes a reliable resource for satisfying critical management reporting needs.
Growth in Customer Acquisitions
Retention is one of the key drivers of growing a commercial loan portfolio. To do so, a commercial lending software solution that supports the sales process and makes client information more accessible can be a key difference maker when it comes to maintaining and growing customer acquisition numbers.
When a bank or credit union implements a commercial lending software solution, a primary feature of the system should include helping to grow and retain commercial customers. The right tool should support sales staff throughout the process, making client information more readily available.
Driving new customer interactions is always important, but a good commercial loan origination system allows you to retain and expand the relationships with existing customers, requiring fewer hours of dedicated resources, and increasing profitability.
Efficiencies in the Underwriting Process
An efficient underwriting process that deploys an optimized credit approval processes using workflow automations and business rules can make the process easier on both institution staff and commercial loan customers.
By leveraging automation in a lending software solution, there are fewer keystrokes for both the banker and the customer, eliminating errors and reducing manual hours spent on applications, allowing for more loans to be processed and profitability to grow.
Enhanced Regulatory Compliance
Bankers know the importance of meeting compliance expectations and customers often rely on the financial institution to be the expert in that area. By leveraging a lending software solution, banks and credit unions can improve regulatory compliance by gathering exposure information and deposit data, creating a complete view of each client. Using information that has already been gathered to create a holistic view of the customers reduces inefficiencies and cuts down on the time required to get an accurate summary.
Increased collaboration across teams
As your lending operations grow and mature, expand the workflow by integrating other services from Baker Hill. While our commercial lending software solution within Baker Hill NextGen® is great as a stand-alone product, its value is maximized when combined with the full capabilities of our data integration, portfolio monitoring, business intelligence, and transactional loan origination solutions.
Wondering if now is the right time to upgrade your commercial loan origination solution? Check out this guide to learn more about Baker Hill NextGen® Commercial Loan Origination: https://www.bakerhill.com/guides/los-software-guide
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Lending software solution advice from expert Donnie Ritzline
In lending, things seem to change monthly, products, regulations, people, etc. Financial institutions are having to constantly keep up with an ever-changing landscape. Keeping up with the changes and making sure procedures are done consistently while staying in compliance with regulations is hard to do when there is not a centralized lending software solution and clear processes.
I started in banking as a teller and customer service associate in 1998 at the main office of a bank with 16 offices that had about $900M in assets. After about two years, I was promoted to work within our consumer lending team as a loan processor.
Our team consisted of two consumer loan officers and me as the processor tasked with completing all the consumer loans received (both approved or declined) at our office. The struggle to have the set up at multiple locations was challenging to make sure we were making “consistent” lending decisions to stay in compliance.
The lending software solution we used was not set up to provide safeguards to assist with maintaining the necessary consistencies. Fortunately, it was not long until our bank decided to centralize our processes. Having a centralized team and a lending software solution that helped control consistencies across the board played a huge role in the success of our team (lenders, processors, bank as a whole) moving forward.
Shortly after my stint within our consumer loan department, I moved over to be a part of a new team—commercial small business as the small business portfolio manager.
The department was started when the bank decided to segment loans less than $250k (aggregate exposure under $1M) and greater than $250k. While deals above $250k would take more time with financial and collateral analysis because of a more complex deal structure, the underwriting review process was similar:
A credit analyst would have to input the financials into a spreadsheet for specific ratios. They would also review the collateral information to make sure the collateral was viable.
The commercial lender and credit analyst would present the loan to the Loan Committee for approval. More and more loan requests were coming in from small business owners with the amount requested being under $250k.
The main reason to create the new “commercial small business” team was to hopefully expedite the lending process for small business owners and their requests. Our team could have been even more efficient if we had a lending software solution that would allow us to minimize downstream reworks and duplicate data entry as well as a scoring model that would help to assist with decisioning.
Now, come full circle to my time here at Baker Hill.
Baker Hill NextGen’s small business loan origination product would have been a lot of help to my team. Their lending software solution would have lifted some burden off of the commercial lenders along with allowing more of a streamlined/automated workflow on deals that were smaller in value, but greater in the number of applications.
Typically, we only had about four commercial lenders and about 13 branch/banking center managers, so we would have been able to have more people to discuss loan opportunities for small business owners. Also, having a scoring model approach for approval/decline recommendations would have been helpful because if you think of it, a small business deal is really similar to a consumer deal.
The largest differences are that the borrower is a business/organization instead of an individual and typically the value of the deal.
You want a lending software solution with a scoring model that provides recommendations based on the credit file of the borrower(s) and the institution’s credit/underwriting policies that are set up “behind the scenes.”
Being able to create a dynamic credit memo inside the lending software solution would have also made it much easier to put together more complex deals. Updating financials and balance information could be a time-consuming task since we were pulling information from multiple spreadsheets and systems.
With a cutting-edge lending software solution, our team would have been able to update our credit memo with a couple of clicks, making it much more efficient to update loan packages for our committee.
Using the right small business lending software solution allows for the opportunity to create consistency and streamline workflows across the life of the loan opportunity for your organization.
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Lending software solution advice from expert Doug Johnson
There’s good news, and there’s bad news. Industry prognosticators are reporting that consumer lending has rebounded to pre-COVID levels. If you are the chief credit officer overseeing consumer lending, that is the good news. But do you have the appropriate lending software solution to handle the increased consumer loan requests? Are your systems, policies and practices ready for the tsunami? If not, well that is bad news. Many lending institutions have not been sitting idle during the lockdown. We all learned how we can live our lives and do our jobs virtually. And very effectively it seems. Using Amazon, Door Dash and the likes is not just for one age segment. Consumers young and old are digitally connected now more than ever. Banks and credit unions are responding to this new reality. Those who had an on-line lending software solution are making them better; those who didn’t are scrambling to acquire digital technology.
In my advisory role I have had the opportunity to work with many financial institutions on their consumer loan origination solution. Their acquisition methods range broadly from small to large. No matter if your model is having your commercial lenders servicing consumer lending request or if you use a completely online digital application model, having the correct lending software solution for consumer loan origination is critical now more than ever. Why? Because you completion is coming for you.
So, are you ready for the tsunami? Let’s go through a readiness exercise looking at your current consumer lending software solution and loan origination processes:
Do you have multiple channels for consumer loan application intake?
- A robust online loan application process that feeds into your lending software solution and can support interaction between the customer and consumer loan origination team?
- What about the branches? Are your branch personnel trained and equipped to conduct the application interview? Do you provide them a simple easy to use/easy to learn lending software solution that will guide them through the application process?
- Are these technologies connected natively to your consumer loan underwriting system?
Can you:
- Make a credit decision on a simple consumer loan in minutes that is completely compliant with your lending policy and lending regulations?
- Take an approved loan request docs right away without rekeying data?
- Conduct both in-branch and digital loan closings?
- Make configuration changes to your consumer loan origination delivery channels within your lending software solution without waiting for your software partner?
If you could answer yes to all of these questions, congratulations. If not, no worries, there is still time should you desire to invest in a lending software solution for your consumer loan origination. Either way, the good news is consumer loan demand is on the rise. Go get ‘em.
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Lending software solution advice from expert Lorraine Montuori
From origination through payoff, every loan requires some level of due diligence consisting of documents and forms to be collected, reviewed, or monitored that are typically tracked in a lending software solution. This information often must pass through many different departments, which can be difficult to manage while bottlenecking processes, putting the financial institution at risk, and frustrating clients.
Exception tracking, done right, can be a powerful feature of the best lending software solutions. Look for a technology that assists in managing all you may need to track, starting from the initial loan request, following through to pay off and collateral release.
Tracking Families, Types, and Statuses
With a good lending software solution, exception tracking provides the capability for a financial institution’s many different requirements to be organized into families within the technology.
This allows flexibility to manage processes for different tracking types, as what needs to be done and who is responsible will be vastly different for a financial statement vs. a policy exception vs. an appraisal.
Within each of those families holds the many different types of documents to be accounted for, which is crucial since financial statements have many different types, such as:
- tax returns (business and personal)
- personal financial statements
- balance sheets
- P&Ls
- monthly, quarterly, and annual requirements
Statuses provide a workflow for each of the tracking families within the lending software solution.
An appraisal, for instance, has a complex workflow from requesting bids to waiting for the appraisal to be returned until finally reviewed and cleared, vs. a policy exception will be a simpler workflow of collecting, reviewing, and clearing.
Queries
Some of the most common things I hear when speaking to financial institutions about lending software solutions is the struggle and confusion around due diligence, e.g.
- Who is working on that?
- What do I need for this loan?
- Did the credit analyst get my email with the tax return?
- When is this requirement due?
- Is my appraisal back yet?
- What items came in that need to be reviewed?
Without the proper reporting inside your lending software solution, getting the answers to these can be frustrating and time-consuming.
Find a lending software solution with query functionality with its tracking to give each team member visibility into their workload, including updates that are happening in real-time directly inside the lending software solution. Lenders need to see and access this information differently from a loan operations role.
The tracking families, types, and statuses give the controls required for that user security as well as being able to filter data into the right areas of focus.
Client Communication
Another frustration I hear about lending software solutions is looking for an easier way to get what is needed from their clients. The exception tracking module comes with standard letter templates that will pull the client’s info and requirements into the lending software solution to eliminate additional data entry and prevent risk.
You may also want to look for a lending software solution that includes a client portal
for the collection of tracking items, taking the letter capability one step further and communicating needs directly to clients, and receiving the items needed back—all without having to leave their lending software solution.
Tracking Ties
One of the most powerful but often overlooked features of any exception tracking lending software solution is creating ties on individual tracking items.
With customers often having multiple entities, guarantors, loans, etc., tracking everything required to prevent the financial institution from being at risk is complex and can be hard to keep track of. Ties allow you to have one tracking item related to client, collateral, product, and opportunity levels within your lending software solution.
So, if John Smith is a guarantor on ABC Corp and XYZ LLC, both entities having loans that require John’s personal tax return annually, tracking ties will allow you to relate the one tracking item to all levels needed. This will eliminate duplicated requests to your client, saving and updating multiple times and preventing missed clearings that would cause an unnecessary out-of-compliance.
Checklists
Electronic checklists built into your lending software solution provide an additional layer to streamline more complex needs. Financial institutions typically need the same items for the same types of loans, collateral, and client types, and there are multiple items needed for each.
For example, the checklist capability within Baker Hill’s lending software solutions allows for grouping together tracking items based on the different scenarios, for easier creation of many at once. I need every other requirement satisfied for a construction loan vs an equipment purchase, or business vs an individual.
Managing due diligence during the life of a loan is cumbersome. The lending software solution tools I talked about within Baker Hill NextGen’s exception management module can assist with eliminating your pain points and errors while also giving your customer a positive experience.
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Lending software solution advice from expert Alyssa Graff
Imagine you are preparing to bake a cake.
You’ve gone to the store, purchased the ingredients, preheated the oven, and now you have it all laid out in front of you. The 9x13 pan, the eggs, the oil, and the box of cake mix. Taking inventory, you know that this task will require some time and effort, but the result will be well worth it.
Now imagine that you have a secret button in your kitchen. A button that takes all the ingredients, mixes them perfectly, and yields a cake that Julia Child would applaud. Sounds nice, right?
Unfortunately, that button does not (yet) exist. If it did, though, I would be the first person in line to get it for the simple reason that it would make that process so much easier.
Like baking a cake, loan origination also requires time and effort. And while there isn’t a secret button to complete loan originations for you, lending software solutions can help you streamline your lending processes like gathering borrower information, performing financial analysis, securing collateral, structuring the terms, among many other things.
Baker Hill NextGen simplifies this process by allowing us to enter this information once and store it to facilitate the approval process—all in one lending software solution. Baker Hill NextGen also can take what has been entered and populate it directly into a credit memorandum document—a key piece to the approval process.
All of your “ingredients” are within one lending software solution in Baker Hill NextGen. Through the click of a button, we can generate a complete, automated version of this document that fits each institution’s needs (the cake).
The process begins with a document template. Within the document template are the instructions that Baker Hill NextGen will use the pull in the appropriate data directly from the lending software solution database. It is possible to author this document template from scratch—choosing the specific data to be populated.
Alternatively, Baker Hill’s loan origination system provides a repository of documents (including a credit memo) that can be published as-is for users to generate. Each document within the lending software solution repository was created with the intention of ease in making changes.
Meaning that you can take the credit memo provided by Baker Hill, remove sections, add additional sections, edit the existing sections, and publish that for use, as well. Regardless of the document’s creation, once it has been published into the lending software’s database, users are able to render the document on demand.
The end result will always be a completed document that can immediately be walked down the hall for approval. The days of rekeying data and manually crafting your memo each time are gone! Through the automation of the credit memorandum, we can have our cake and eat it too.
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Baker Hill’s Lending Software Solution
Baker Hill has been providing innovative lending software solutions and expert guidance to banks and credit unions for over 35 years.
Built by bankers for bankers, we know the importance of features like portfolio monitoring, statement spreading, online loan applications, pricing and profitability, client relationship management, commercial lending, small business lending, consumer lending, exception tracking, and credit memo automation.
If you’re interested in more ways a lending software solution can help your financial institution, read our resource guide to learn more.
Posted on Tuesday, December 7, 2021 at 11:30 AM
by
Baker Hill
Author Bio
Baker Hill empowers progressive financial institutions to increase revenue, reduce risk, and drive more profitable relationships.
Streamline business, consumer direct and indirect lending with our common origination platform. Understand profitability and risk at every level with our sophisticated business intelligence and analytics. Monitor and maintain a healthy financial portfolio with our statement analysis, exception, and risk management solutions.
Explore our solutions below for more information on how to generate sustainable growth, minimize risk and increase profitability.